The kind of killjoy I always was is that when I was 12, the family friend and babysitting grad student who considered herself my 'adoptive big sister' said to me, "You're 12 going on 36," and I reacted with delight.
Maybe I should feel bad about being Like That instead of more or less proud of it, but I'm not sure you can help that (can you?). (Is being a killjoy like some form of mild sadism too? Maybe that's genetic.)
Thirty-six always seemed like a good age to me, and I liked the idea of it. (I didn't know about the increasing frequency of waking up with kinks in your neck after the mid-twenties yet at that point.) I had always preferred adult company to children's, which in retrospect was probably from a combination of an understandable difficulty relating to agemates, and the fact that I usually interacted with adults in the company of my parents, which was considerably easier for an anxious and socially awkward precocious child. They encouraged my belief that adults should treat me more or less like an adult, and my sense of this was so strong that I furiously resented adults who condescended to me (if I think about it now, I'll still get angry: natural-born talent for holding grudges here).
I've been thirty-six for more than six months, and I've remembered this incident more often in that time for obvious reasons. Aside from the kinks in the neck thing, it's not a bad pick, but ironically given my childhood attitude, my relationship to adulthood from the inside has always been weird (traumatic life changes, mental health issues, etc). Or maybe not ironic, since you could say as a child I simply wanted to be an adult, and as an adult I pretty quickly realized that adulthood didn't exist.
Also, I was already just as capable of raining on a parade or refusing to join in the fun at 12, although it's certainly easier to read instead of participating as an adult, which is a big plus.
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